Learning

[Peanut Butter]

I am wondering if anyone here can tell me about all this stuff I know I probably sound really stupid but I am really interested. So if you have any pointers or anything that would be great. lol oh and just wondering how did you all learn all this.

[Glasgow]

All what stuff?

[fdsgfg55465]

like all computers? go to www.google.com...

[Peanut Butter]

Sorry about my above post. I was not thinking clearly obviously. I was just wondering what are all the diff kinds of programs like Mac, Windows, and etc. and what is the diff in them.

[Glasgow]

Ill touch at the topic abit, although I must admit I don't know everything.

So RAM is I guess the memory you have on your computer, and I beileive it affects how fast things are.

Hard Drive is the amount of space on your C drive that it can hold. Ex. Most programs take up some space on your HardDrive/C drive.

Graphic Cards are chips that enhance the graphics on your computer. Mostly used for better game play.

Well Kiros can explain everything else from here ;)

[pootybooty]

You should not try to venture into the satan world. I heard that the computer may explode at any given time. I am only allowed five minutes a day on my ultra fast pentium 2 166mhz computer. I am worried that the internet is taking up bites. My mother dearest told me I have three hundred gig-o-bites running at four hundred rpm's.

[Glasgow]

You should not try to venture into the satan world. I heard that the computer may explode at any given time. I am only allowed five minutes a day on my ultra fast pentium 2 166mhz computer. I am worried that the internet is taking up bites. My mother dearest told me I have three hundred gig-o-bites running at four hundred rpm's.

5 minutes?! and 300GB!! Holy hell dude, u musst be loaded

[Kiros]

So Trevor, do you just want to know about software and how it varies from operating system, or do you want to learn just about anything? :P

[Peanut Butter]

anything really cause I really want to know well just about anything lol

[Skhorpion]

first off, winblows, mac, linux, etc aren't "programs" they are Operating systems. the programs run within them

i hate software with a passion so ill let kiros touch on that

consider your harddrive a warehouse, it stores everything permanently unless it is removed otherwise. there are many kinds of harddrives. 5400 through 15k rpm, different buffer sizes, size in gb of course, platter density and interface

RAM (random access memory) is a million times faster than a harddrive but is much smaller and is cleared when theres no power going to it. when you open a program it loads part of itself into RAM so that it can be used in a speedy manner

the motherboard is the equivalent of the human nervous system, it lets all the parts of the computer communicate with each other and controls speeds of many different parts.

you should know what a power supply does... ill just say this In: 110vac or 220vac Out: 12, 5, 3.3, -5, -12vdc

video card puts video to your monitor and renders 3d stuff during games

network interface card lets you be on a network (100mbit networks are most common and 1gbit networks are rare for home use)

im not going to talk about the processor as it is a complicated beech

this has been your revised computer lesson by KiD AKA Rent-2-Pwn

[Kiros]

As Cory enlightened you on mostly hardware, I'll try and extend upon that:

A motherboard is, in fact, the main part of a computer. Everything plugs in to it and it let's everything communicate with one another. It contains important, built-in chips such as the Northbridge, Southbridge, and Super I/O. It also has controllers for hard drives [40 pin controller (7 pin for serial drives)], floppy drives (34 pin controller), video card(s) (AGP/PCIE), and various devices that can go in PCI slots.

A processor can be thought as a brain, although it's actually an extremely fast and accurate calculator. It goes through 0's and 1's interpreting, factoring, coordinating and such. The 0's and 1's it goes through come from either the hard drive or the RAM. It also accepts input from devices such as the keyboard and mouse, however, onboard chips (Southbride and Super I/O) receive and 'decipher' data from input devices. These devices include: mouse, keyboard, parallel/serial, and USB/FireWire devices. Again, these are handled by the motherboard's onboard chips instead of the processor, however, digital data is sent to the processor so it may be sent to the correct hardware (such as the video card). Oh, and the CPU and processor are technically two different things. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is a tiny but extremely important part of the processor (usually about 1/3 - 1/4 the size of the processor, itself). The rest of the processor is made up of cache and other jazz that you don't need to know about.

Eh, that's basically all the technical stuff that Cory didn't cover (I think anyway :P).

Now, software is what is run from the hardware. Normally, when we think of software, we think of programs, but really, software is anything that is purely logical and that can be written/read and created/erased from hardware. This means operating systems (OS) counts as software. So without software, computers could not run (they could, but not like they can with software, and the data would have to be physically embedded into the hardware, but we don't need to get into that.) Now, think of software as this: anything and everything you see on your screen right now is coming from software - from the start menu to the browser, to the background programs you can't see running.

Operating systems and programs are both software, however, they strongly differ in some ways. Operating systems only need compatible hardware to be run (and installed for that matter). Programs and applications (same thing) need a compatible operating system to run. Also, programs run inside the operating system and the operating system interprets what the program does. Actually, the operating system manages the memory and how programs are run - eh, basically, the OS manages everything that you click and whatnot on the computer :P Programs can also have 'childs' (programs that are created from a 'parent' - usually the OS but sometimes a program) that run in the scope of the 'parent' application - in other words, the program that started another program can have complete control over it. There are different levels of programs: Operating system level (AKA Kernel level) :arrow: Program level. Since the operating system communicates directly (pretty much anyway) with the hardware, any application that runs at OS level can control hardware (or some of it). Applications that run at program level have no control over the OS nor the hardware.

All software is linked down to either "machine code" or a certain language which the operating system interprets. A program can be written in one language and compiled and work the exact same way another program works that was written in a different language. However, there are different languages (C, C++, VC++, C#, Java, J++, J#, Basic, VBasic, QBasic, etc.) because there are some advantages of each one. The three most common languages used are (V)C++, Java, and (V)Basic and all are very powerful. An advantage of C++ over the other two, is that the dynamic libraries it's programs commonly require are built into the OS, so after it is compiled and linked into a program, it doesn't need to have extra libraries or a virtual machine to run it. Anyway, you really don't need to know any languages unless you like to program.

I guess that's all for now. I might come up with some more content later.

Computer Lesson #1 from //KiroS

[Skhorpion]

via chipset owns

DFI motherboards are the best

OCZ RAM is the best

Seagate makes the best harddrives

Western Digital makes the fastest normal human harddrives (meaning not counting scsi)

.... i wont mention video cards

AMD makes best processors